REVIEW: Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The World at the MAST Mayflower Studios

Kate Pankhurst’s who is distantly related to the suffragette Emily Pankhurst first published her book Fantastically Great Women in 2016 and will soon have seven in the series. Changed the World is now accompanied by Made History, Worked Wonders, Saved the Planet, Stories of Ambition, Adventure and Bravery, Scientists, and their stories and soon Artistes and their stories. These beautifully illustrated books must have caught the imagination of a new young generation of girls and their mothers and are a compelling reminder of the many achievements of a group of heroines highly committed and motivated to make a difference to the World. At a time when the theatre has such a vital role to play in promoting equality and diversity, the material is ripe for adaption to the stage.

Chris Bush has adapted the books for the stage with the music of Miranda Cooper and Jennifer Decilveo and created a seventy-five-minute celebration of some of these women aimed very firmly at young girls aged 6 to 16 and their mums who might be inspired by the stories. The end result is a sort of mash-up of Horrible Histories with a Night in the Museum and an occasional touch of the Six musical treatment of Henry VIII’s wives. The development of all musicals takes time and there is a sense that this premiere at MAST in Southampton is not quite the finished article with every aspect requiring fine-tuning and adjustment.

Set in the Gallery of Greatness which is depicted as a warehouse of brown crates with bright illuminated neon arrow lights the structure has the young actress playing Jade on stage throughout. She is the schoolgirl hiding with her teddy bear as the gallery closes, or was it opening it was hard to tell, to have an adventure in which she meets the characters from the past. It is a lot to ask of the four young ladies who rotate the role. On opening night 16-year-old Eva-Marie Saffrey, who has appeared as Matilda in the West End, played the part of the 11-year-old Jade and the first-night audience gave her deserved rapturous encouragement at every opportunity.

REVIEW: Four Quartet at the MAST Mayflower Studios

Ralph Fiennes is one of our best British actors remembered by a wide public for his betrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter Films and M in several Bond films. I shall forever remember him for his reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis at Reading Gaol, a marathon effort that held us spellbound and enthralled for four hours in front of just the cell door of Wilde’s prison cell. His latest stage appearance is in TS Eliot’s poems Four Quartet which started life at the Theatre Royal in Bath and is heading for the Harold Pinter Theatre in London from the 18th November. 

Fiennes directs himself in the powerful and physical recitation of the four poems as he prowls around the stage with two large grey monoliths and two old wooden chairs and a table as his only aids. Eliot’s poems were written between 1935 and 1941 and there is a helpful glossary in the programme of around twenty-five words used that may be less familiar to a modern audience and some interesting articles to provide some context for the work. However, I was left feeling intellectually inadequate as I struggled to make sense during the show of the frustrating contradictory paradoxes used throughout. In lesser hands, it would have become uninteresting, but Fiennes breathes life into the words and convinces that he understands the meaning. Every P and T is accentuated in his delivery in a masterclass of pronunciation and elocution so that not a word is lost. If the aim is to provoke thought, discussion, and reflection it works a treat, but I would have liked more visual aids to provide more immediate in show understanding.